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Making meaning in women’s spiritual autobiography: Language, materiality, and agency in colonial New Granada

  • Constance G. Janiga-Perkins EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: July 17, 2015

Abstract

This article examines the multiple ways in which meaning is made in female spiritual autobiography by studying a specific text, the Vida by the Colombian Poor Clare nun Mother Gerónima del Espíritu Santo, neé Jerónima Nava y Saavedra (1669–1727). First, it analyzes this life story as a socially constructed assemblage of written words that have been shown by critics to create agency (dominant reading). Then, the article discusses how the materiality of its N1 manuscript also makes meaning and creates agency (non-dominant reading). Using the work of Van Leeuwen, Björkvall, and Karlsson, the study offers valuable insight into the meaning-making of Early Modern script in New Granada, an area that until now has not been placed under this particular branch of semiotic analysis. It also studies how the social practices surrounding the penitent/confessor relationship in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the exigencies of reading and editing today are strong forces in shaping manuscript material into meaning. The article concludes that the materiality of the N1 Vida documents the shades and hues of agency that the language of the manuscript alone cannot.

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Published Online: 2015-7-17
Published in Print: 2015-10-1

©2015 by De Gruyter Mouton

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Sports utility semiotics: A semantic differential study of symbolic potential in automobile design
  3. Making meaning in women’s spiritual autobiography: Language, materiality, and agency in colonial New Granada
  4. What is the proper characterization of the alphabet? VII: Sleight of hand
  5. Towards a semiotics of multilingualism
  6. In the arena: Communication between animals and Christians in damnatio ad bestias
  7. Dire l’indicible et décrire l’indescriptible: Ressources imagières et linguistiques des poilus
  8. Mathematics and Peirce’s semiotic
  9. Icarus ignored: Riffaterre and Eagleton on Auden’s Musée des Beaux Arts
  10. The “monster” of Seymour Avenue: Internet crime news and Gothic reportage in the case of Ariel Castro
  11. Kenneth L. Pike and science fiction
  12. Environmental communications: The reader’s perspective
  13. A Peircean typology of cultural prime symbols: Culture as category
  14. The poetry of sound and the sound of poetry: Navajo poetry, phonological iconicity, and linguistic relativity
  15. The language of fashion in postmodern society: A social semiotic perspective
  16. From Saussure to sociology and back to linguistics: Niklas Luhmann’s reception of signifiant/signifié and langue/parole as the basis for a model of language change
  17. The machine or the garden: Semiotics and the American yard
  18. Photogénie as “the Other” of the semiotics of cinema: On Yuri Lotman’s concept of “the mythological”
  19. Who said it? Voices in news translation, from a semiotic perspective
  20. Why semiotics, why poetry?
  21. How brands (don’t) do things: Corporate branding as practices of imagining “commens
  22. Film space as mental space
  23. Netizen communicology: China daily and the Internet construction of group culture
  24. Questions toward a Peircean phenomenological description of association
  25. Colonial bodies: Slavery, wage-slavery, and the representation of race
  26. Discourse analysis with Peirce? Making sense of discursive regularities: The case of online university prospectuses
  27. Heidegger and the signs of history
  28. To be continued: meaning-making in serialized manga as functional-multimodal narrative
  29. Empiricism within the limits of postmodernism alone: On the emergence of the logically real within the multi-perspectival field
  30. Propaganda mala fide: Towards a comparative semiotics of violent religious persuasion
  31. Review article
  32. Peircean visual semiotics: Potentials to be explored
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